24" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part II. Page 9

Although TN matrices are an attribute of budget monitor models, they have not just penetrated the relatively expensive 24-inch monitor segment, but they tend to be a leader there already, at least judging y the number of new models announced lately. But is it necessarily a bad thing? Not very advanced characteristics of TN matrices are well compensated by their low price. Today we are going to talk about 6 monitors on such matrix from Acer, Dell, NEC and Samsung.

The color temperature setup is very neat. The temperature dispersion between the levels of gray is small.

The contrast ratio is average while the maximum brightness is even higher than declared by the manufacturer.

As I noted above, the LCD24WMCX offers factory-set DV modes as well as various image-enhancing options. Let’s now see what they do.

There are five DV Modes for you to choose from. Each mode corresponds to a specific usage of the monitor but I think each mode is rather too bright. The Text mode should have a brightness of 100 nits. It’s also not quite clear why sports events should be watched at a much higher brightness than movies.

Each mode has a bad effect on color reproduction. They differ in the brightness setting only while the contrast is also set at 80% and you cannot change that. As I wrote above, selecting a contrast setting above 56% leads to a loss of light halftones in the image – they are displayed as pure white then.

That’s exactly what we have in each DV Mode. There is only one diagram. The modes only differing in brightness, which has no effect on color reproduction, the gamma curves are identical in all of them.

The lack of a dedicated button to switch between the DV Modes is a problem, too. You have to enter the monitor’s main menu to select one.

The menu also offers a few image-enhancing methods most of which just increase the saturation of one or several basic colors, so there is no talking about accurate colors. I’ll discuss two modes as examples: Full Enhance and Green Field.

The Full Enhance mode leads to a loss of lightest halftones, especially of red and blue.

The Green Field mode increases the saturation of green in an intellectual way: in those parts of the image where green is predominant. In other words, gray remains gray but green grass acquires a fantastically bright, acid, hue. The gamma curves are shaped correspondingly, of course.

If you are into blues, there is a blue-enhancing mode as well. It works in the same manner and has the same dubious practical value.

Overall, the AccuSync LCD24WMCX can hardly be regarded as a low-end monitor not only because of its price but also because of its functionality: video inputs including a digital HDMI interface, dynamic contrast mode, and a settings-rich menu. As a result, the LCD24WMCX is somewhere in between the simpler TN-based monitors and the more advanced VA-based models (such as the above-discussed Dell 2407WFP-HC) in terms of price, specs and functionality.